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Vim School and The Textual Katana

TLDR: I’m running a low-fi to the point Vim course once a week for 10 weeks and a spot in the forum for help. You’ll get 10+ hours of video and my configurations and notes. You can buy it at http://bit.ly/GetVimSchooled and the first Seminar is up.

I’ve had many people ask me how I use Vim, but I couldn’t really figure out how to write a book to teach Vim. I realized a while back that the majority of the things people need to learn about Vim are best demonstrated in an interactive way. I can blast you a book with all the commands and tell you that 10cw will delete 10 words but, until you actually see someone who’s good at Vim do that it doesn’t seem to click.

The other thing I’ve realized is that everyone tells people how to use Vim, and then proceeds to do it in a totally different way. It’s just too hard to keep track of all the ways I might use Vim, little tricks, settings, how I use power macros, and other things unless I’m really editing and then showing you how to do it.

So, last week I threatened everyone on Twitter that I’d create a series of videos I’m calling Vim School and this week I did exactly that. I’m recording these in a Live Seminar format with a core group of students who are beta testing my Learn Code Live project. That means there’s people asking me to repeat things while I’m demonstrating Vim concepts so they keep me honest and make sure I don’t gloss over things.

If you want to get in on this, then you can buy it at http://bit.ly/GetVimSchooled and you’ll get 1 seminar per week after my LCLive students have seen it. The first seminar is up and it’s 1h 11m long with a crash course jump into Vim. You’ll get an announcement on the https://forum.learncodethehardway.com/c/vim-school part of the forum, and you can get clarifications and help.

Features

Vim School is like Vim itself: Low-fi, brutalist, no frills, to the point, and effective. There’s no fancy graphics, diagrams, pretty buttons, or anything but Zed showing you Vim in all its blazing fast Text Mode Katana glory. I’m doing these videos in 1080p, but honestly I could do them in 480p and they’d still work.

It’ll be based on how I use Vim, which is a much simpler and more reasonable way to use it for a beginner.

You won’t be required to use hjkl to move around. You’ll just use arrow keys, but more importantly, you’ll learn that the entire point of Vim is to not do tiny moves anyway.

All the videos will dynamic keystroke display so you can see exactly what I type.

There will be session notes posted shortly after the seminar is posted.

I do everything inside Vim. I write up the sessions notes live, edit code, run it in a terminal, every single thing I can I do from Vim. This helps you see if I’m using and secret tricks you haven’t heard of that you want to learn.

I’ll provide you with my configurations each week so you can build up your own configuration by learning what each thing does. This first seminar I did a quick run through and put up a minimalist config for everyone to use.

Price is $19.99 for all of the videos, and you’ll get 1 per week assuming I don’t have anything pressing that week stopping me. If I’m ever late a week you’ll get double the next week.

Wait, What’s LCLive?

I’ve been running live training for beginning programmers for the last 6 months in a private beta. I’ve had to really change how it runs several times to simplify it and to figure out this whole online streaming thing. Let me tell you, online streaming of a screen is much harder than it seems if you want to do it with any kind of quality.

The original incarnation of LCLive was the Junior Developer Certification Program but that was way too complex and involved for people to do successfully. I’ve since stripped that concept down to just something that provides people who are learning to code with extra help from me in the form of:

A private section of the forum where you get priority assistance with your code.

Help with nearly anything related to becoming a programmer or working your first job.

One main video a week where I cover some topic in a series. We’re currently in the Debugging and Refactoring series. I’m taking volunteer’s code and we’re all debugging it or I’m refactoring it to show how I’d do it. We’ll probably do this for a while since it seems to really help people.

Special bonus videos such as this Vim School. That means yes, if you sign up for LCLive you just get Vim School included with your LCLive subscription.

Access to all of the past LCLive videos, which is about 30 hours of content right now.

I’ve almost got the format nailed down, so I’ve been keeping it quiet and among my tiny group of friendly students who want the extra help. I’m not quite ready to release it fully, but if you want to sign up then it’s $99.99 per month and you have to email me at help@learncodethehardway.org asking to join LCLive. You’ll have to understand that there’s going to be tech issues at times because it’s a beta product, but it seems to be going well as of this week.

What About Emacs School?

I could potentially do a similar Emacs course but I honestly really suck at Emacs as it’s not my main editor at all. If you’re an Emacs grand master and interested in doing a similar course feel free to comment and let me know.